Local Enterprise

Local economies need local business leaders. The alternative to locally-committed entrepreneurship is extractive absentee capital: corporations headquartered in distant cities that hire locally at market wages, extract the surplus, and have no particular investment in the community's long-term flourishing. Communities served by absentee capital may have economic activity, but they do not have economic ownership.

CHI forms a different kind of merchant and entrepreneur — business leaders with a sense of place-obligation. Not naïve local romanticism, but a coherent vision: businesses that hire from the community, source locally where possible, reinvest in local institutions, and see their own long-term flourishing as linked to the community's. This is not charity; it is a different economic logic, grounded in the multi-generational time horizon that is central to CHI's mission.

The accredited commerce programs CHI deploys are rigorous in their content — accounting, finance, management, marketing — but they are shaped by the CHI context: taught by tutors who are themselves local business owners or professionals, in communities where the students' grandparents built the town, for graduates who intend to stay and build.